The engrafted word

The graftings of flesh upon flesh, of history upon time and memory, of the New World upon the Old, of language upon literature and silence, of faith upon doubt: these are the graftings that form this third book of poems by Karl Kirchwey. Whether he is writing of the intimate moment, as in "Sonogram" (in which the poet first sees his son-to-be), or the painfully personal, as in "Barium" (in which he recounts a brush with mortality). Kirchwey reaches effortlessly across time to link us to our past, to the larger universe that is humankind.